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About how many articles should I have in place before I start a ppc campaign? Or should I just be patient for "natural" traffic?

Thanks in advance

You really only need one article to begin doing PPC. You just need to be sure you're specific enough with your keywords that people will find the specific article for their needs. Just don't go buying general PPC traffic and start sending people to a list of articles. Customers need to be extremely targeted.

Snib gives great advice. Target Target Target!
Start a small campaign with a separate Ad Group for each topic. Set your budget to $3 a day if that is what you are comfortable with. You do not need to start big to get your feet wet with PPC.
So often, we see someone here say something like "I wasted $1500 sending traffic to xxxxx and it didn't convert."
Start small where your losses are no more than the amount of a night out if you fall flat on your face. Nobody who does PPC makes money on all projects. Some work, some don't. FWIW, I seem to hit about 1 in 10 times where I make money on a PPC project. The other 9 are learning experiences. The beauty of it is that when you hit that 1 in 10, it keeps paying for weeks, months, years...then you find another one, and another.

To add to what has already been said above, do take time to optimize regardless of your PPC strategy/plans. SEO is still a mighty way to get business going online, and there is hardly anything better fit for SEO than content-packed sites/pages.

Thanks snib, scooter and geno. I'm still really intimidated by ppc so I'm in no hurry to jump on board with it just yet.

When you say be targeted, do you mean land them on the article itself and not the homepage? Which now that I think about, that makes a lot more sense then sending them to the index and expecting them to find it.

Yes. If I search for "cure for ear mites" don't send me to your home page and make me find the article on your solution for ear mites. Land me on the article itself. Just as if I search for a New Balance 991 Running Shoe, don't land me on the page with 75 other New Balance styles. Show the customer exactly what they search for and your PPC has a much better chance of success.
Make the content of the ad itself that specific as well. If I search for "cure for ear mites", I am much less likely to click an ad for Dog Supplies or Dog Advice than I am an ad for Dog Ear Health or Ear Mite Remedy.

Stick your feet in this pool only when you are ready. Go in only as deep as you are comfortable and see what happens. That is the beauty of PPC. When I made my first ad buys on the web, it was with Alta Vista, MSN and Yahoo and I had huge (at the time anyway) spend commitments on keyword-activated banner ads.

By the way, I've been having a lot of success recently with StumbleUpon advertising for content sites. You only pay for visits, and people on StumbleUpon are actively looking for new sites to bookmark, so I find they end up clicking through my site to other pages and coming back later on to read more. They offer an interesting alternative to PPC, especially because the prices are very low (.05 per visitor)